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COPIES OF THIS BOOKLET MAY BE HAD BY SENDING FIFTY 
(50) CENTS TO CALDWELL SITES COMPANY. BOOKSELLERS 
AND STATIONERS. ROANOKE, VIRGINIA 









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" ftis louing faitb in IHotbfr-lani) 
ftnf to npupr sliabp of turning ; 
Be Britain's lafefs, be Ifba's toaUf, 
QUbatfUfr she toas o'pr dim, 
fat bfaro J)pr rium' rushing sound, 
I&?r bluf ppaus rosp brtorf bim." 

W'lin jut- "Randolph of Roanokt ' 




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THE BECKONING CAND 



BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R..G.S 

Author of"Thr Third Empire 
"Masters of Europe" 
"All Aboard for Bombay" 
"The Last Frontier," Etc. 






I FIRST heard about the Beckoning Land from an 
African prince— at least he said that, he was a prince— 
in a Paris music-hall. The Balkan War was virtually 
over, Adrianople had fallen, and I. having scraped the mud 
of Bulgaria from my boots, was loafing in the Gay City until 
the next New York-bound steamer sailed. One evening I 
accompanied a friend to the Folies Bergere, which, as 
every one knows, is the most vivid of Paris' countless 
palaces of pleasure. Strolling out to the buffet during 
the entr'acte, we found a chocolate-colored individual, 
whose checkered suit and white-topped shoes fairly radi- 
ated prosperity, sprawling over the bar. 

'•Well. George," I remarked, "you're a long ways from 
home. When did you leave the Pullman service?" 

He drew himself up with a great assumption of dig- 
nity. 

"Ah'd have yoiih understan', sah," he said pompously, 
"dal Ah's not a common, low-down American niggah. 
All's a African prince." 

••Come, come." said I sharply. "Perhaps you can 
make these French people believe t hat, but yon needn't try 
to give me any such song-and-dance. I'm an American." 



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T II E B E C K N I X G L . 1 N D 



His dignity collapsed like a toy balloon in which 
some one has stuck a pin. 

"Scuse me, boss! 'Sense me!" he exclaimed, 
sweeping off his hat, "but Ah nevah 'spected dat yoiih 
was a American. If yoiih insist on knowin". All's fnm 
Roanoke, Virginian, sah. An' b'leve me, boss," he 
added earnestly, "though Paris is suttinly a most 
'strordinarily vivacious metrop'lis, Ah'll be mighty glad 
to get back to Roanoke 'long in the summer time, when 
Mountain Pahk is all 'huninated in the ev'nings, an' 
the black bass is a-bitin' in the rivah. an' watahmelons 
is in season. Take man word foah it, boss, dat's shore 
gwine to be a great city some day." 

Which was merely his way of saying that the City 
on the Seine, with all its attractions, could not lure him 
permanently from that other city on the banks of the 
Roanoke River. Months later, when I found myself a 
visitor in that great valley-garden whose walls are 
formed by the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge, I dis- 
covered that the most characteristic and likable 
qualities of its inhabitants are their pride and faith 
in the land wherein they dwell. 

It was, of course, the fault of Thomas Nelson Page, 
and George W. Cable, and Harris Dickson, and John 
Fox, Jr., and other manufacturers of Southern litera- 
ture, but before I went to Virginia I had always had a 
mental picture of it as a land where happy darkeys 
chanted plantation songs as they picked the cotton, 



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T If E />' E C KO N I N G L A X J) 7 

and where vvhite-moustached Southern colonels in 
frock coals and Panama hats spenl their days riding 
furiously after foxes and their evenings sitting on the 
piazzas of colonial mansions sipping mint juleps. 
Roanoke I had imagined to be a sleepy, lazy town, still 
wrapped in memories of "Before I lie War," with ram- 
shackle street cars drawn by decrepit mules, and rows 
of saddle horses tied to hitching rails along the main 
street, and grass growing between tin 1 cracks in the 
sidewalk. I was — I admit it with shame as ignorant 
as all that and this article is my medium of apology. 

In the first place, it was nearly two decades after 
the surrender at Appomattox before there was such a 
town as Roanoke on the map, so it is obvious that its 
municipal development is not likely to be retarded by 
any very antiquated ideas. Prior to that time it was 
merely an eating station on the stage route to the 
Cumberland Gap, being known by the not particularly 
euphonic name of Old Lick, which indicated, I suppose, 
that salt was to be found in the vicinity. When the 
population reached the one hundred mark the name 
was altered to Big Lick, as befitted a town with metro- 
politan pretensions, but it was not until ISS'-i, when the 
census taker had five hundred names upon his list, 
thai the name was changed to Roanoke, which means 
appropriately enough, "money." In a space of barely 
thirty years the insignificant hamlet of half a thousand 
souls had sprung into a bustling city of approximately 







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T II E B EC K N I X G L . I N J) 








fifty thousand, and. as though not content with that, 
it keeps a-growing and a-growing. 

The most significant thing about Roanoke is the 
fact that it is in the South at all. It is so progressive 
that it would make any city in the West sit up and take 
notice. It is about as far removed from the quaint, 
sleepy, old-fashioned, easy-going town which the out- 
lander associates with Dixie as a young, pretty, and 
highly efficient stenographer is from the old-time clerk 
who sal on a high stool with a quill pen stuck behind 
his ear and used sand instead of a blotter. That 
struck me as being the keynote of Roanoke: modernity. 
It is as up-to-the-minute as a girl just back from Paris. 
lis streets are paved so far into the country that yon 
wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are not in danger 
of giving out. They have automobile fire apparatus, 
among other things, and if a citizen in the extreme out- 
skirts is so careless as to upset the lamp the firemen are 
on the spot before it has had time to burn a hole in the 
carpet. Street cars scuttle np and down its busy 
thoroughfares, and stop, and then scuttle on again, 
exactly like so many very big and busy ants. I did not 
ride in a street car all the time I was in the city. I did 
not have an opportunity. Every time 1 stood on a 
corner waiting for one. some one came along in a motor 
car and called out, " Can't I give you a lift? Jump in." 
I didn't know them and they didn't know me, but it 
didn't seem to make any difference. That seemed to be. 



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to those plans as conscientiously as a Mohammedan 
adheres to the precepts contained in the Koran. 
Whenever a suitable piece of property has come upon 
the market il has promptly been bought and turned 
into a public park, so that the townspeople have no 
need to go into the country to get fresh air and flowers 
and green grass. A hue old-fashioned mansion stands 
in the midst of a splendid stone-walled garden within 
pistol-shot of the business center of the city. Around 
it are acres and acres of green lawns shaded by elms 
which were old when Roanoke was a baby. Passing 
there one afternoon I noticed that the lawns were 




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THE BECKONING LAND 




"A garden parly, I suppose," said I. 

"Not at all," answered my companion, "just people 
oul for an airing. That's one of our public parks. The 
place came into the market not long ago and we bought 
it." 

"Hut it's almost in the heart of the city." I re- 
marked. "It must have cost some money." 

"It did." said he, "hut what's the use of a park if it's 
so far away that it is an effort to reach it?" 

Banks are always accurate barometers of a city's 
prosperity. In Roanoke there is a barometer of this 
kind on nearly every down-town corner. One of them 
in particular is as beautiful an example of architecture 
inside and out, as you will find anywhere. It would not 
look out of place on Wall Street. They have a sur- 
prising number of very beautiful homes in Roanoke— 
English Tudor, and French Chateau, and Italian 
Renaissance, and Spanish Mission, ami plain white 
frame with green blinds — but the pure Colonial, with 
its stately white columns and its splendid, dignified 
lines, they seem to have completely overlooked, al- 
though it is the one style which is peculiarly and 
characteristically Virginian. Indeed, you will find 
more examples of colonial architecture in Seattle than 
you will in Roanoke. Rut that is the way of the world. 
I once went to Persia to gel some Persian lambskins, 
only to he told that I he besl ones had all been shipped 
to New York. After all. the question of what style of 





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T II E B E C KO N I X G LA N J) 13 




houses the people of Roanoke choose l<> build is es- 
sentially their own business. Still, il seems a pity . 
The stranger who strolls along the down-town streets 
<>t Roanoke and looks in the shop windows (and if 
I here is a more fascinating way of passing a spare hour 
than looking in shop windows, I do not know it ) does 
not have to say, "I guess I'll wail until 1 gel to Rich- 
mond or Washington before I buy that hat,'" or dress, 
or suit, or necktie, as the ease may be, for t he Roanoke 
merchants tread hard on the heels of fashion. 

The first thing to catch your eye as the train pulls 
into Roanoke is the hotel. It is long, and low, and 
shingled, with broad, cool, comfortable verandas with 

vines clambering over them, and it has innu rable 

balconies and gables and quaint dormer windows. 1 1 
stands on a knoll in the middle of a park, with trees 
and flower beds and sweeping lawns of emerald velvet 
bordered by a privet hedge. It is so big and spacious 
and unlike the orthodox city hotel in its appearance 
that every one mistakes it for a club house and is 
correspondingly gratified when they find that it is open 
to the public, for. after a hot and dusty railway journey. 
green lawns and cool verandas are far more alluring 
than peacock alleys of imitation onyx and elaborately 
stuccoed, porte-cochered facades. I might add that 
the hotel in question is liberally bathtubized. 

They have a club in Roanoke called the Shenan- 
doah. As a matter of fact, they have a number of 







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clubs, several of them housed very elaborately and 
expensively, l>ut. as il happened, this was the club at 
which I was put up. It is one of those informal, com- 
fortable places where you sit in a big armchair, with a 
mint julep in a tall, frost-coated glass beside you, and 
chat with big men — railway presidents, and mine 
operators, and engineers — who are doing big things, for 
the fact that Roanoke is the gateway to both I he coal 
fields of West Virginia and the prosperous Valley of 
Virginia brings to the club many very interesting and 
worth while people indeed. Listening to some of the 
older members describing their exploits in this very 
region in the days when they followed the guidons of 
Stewart and Stonewall Jackson, or telling the real story 
of the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud, or relating with 
inimitable dialect a negro story, gave me a truer con- 
ception of the South than all the books I had read about 
it put together. To recur for a moment to those mint 
juleps. If the colored gentleman who is employed by 
the club to fabricate them ever wants another job, I 
hope he will let me know. 1 know of at least three 
clubs which would be glad to gel him. 

It goes without saying that they have a country 
club in Roanoke, and a very good one. Perched high 
on a wooded eminence it commands an enchanting 
view of hill and dale. Any afternoon after three you 
will find half the business and professional men of the 
city upon its tennis courts or its golf course, and therein 





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T II E II EC K ONI N G LA N I) 17 

the spirit of the old South still survives, for its people 
nave not yet become so engrossed in the mad scramble 
for money, thank goodness, that they can spare no 
time for recreation. I have always held that a country 
club, no matter how unpretentious, is as essential to 
the prosperity and well-being of a community as a 
chamber of commerce, for it affords a meeting place 
where people can get acquainted with each other and 
where they can discuss, informally and without re- 
straint, their community's problems and needs. 

They are inordinately proud of their city water, are 
the people of Roanoke, and. after having tasted it. I 
think their pride is entirely justified. It is considered, 
1 believe, the third best water supply in the world. Its 
source is a mountain spring anil it is as cold and crystal 
clear as though it came straight from an Alpine glacier. 
If they had such a spring in Switzerland or France some 
one would bottle it and exploit it and sell it for forty 
cents a quart, just as the water from the famous 
Evian Spring, on the Lake of Geneva, which is no whit 
better than (hat of Roanoke, is sold all over the world 
to-day. 

There is no excuse for any Roanoke youth going out 
into the world without an education. There are 
kindergartens, and primary schools, and grammar 
schools, and high schools, and normal schools, and 
business schools, and when the hoy nets through with 
them he can. without leaving his home town, complete 



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7' // E />' E ( ' A' N I N G L . 1 N J) 

lis education at Roanoke College, or breaking home 
ties, he can go over to Lexington (where Robert E. 
Lee and Stonewall Jackson lie sleeping), forty-odd 
miles away, and attend either the famous Virginia 
Military Institute or the University of Washington and 
Lee. of which, at the close of the war. the famous 
Confederate leader became president. Venturing still 
farther afield, the Roanoke lad will hud at Charlottes- 
ville, some ninety miles distant. I he admirably equipped 
and beautifully situated University of Virginia, founded 
by Thomas Jefferson. The education of the other sex 
is equally well provided for. for on a wooded mountain- 
side in the suburbs of Roanoke stands the Virginia 
College for Young Ladies, and at Botetourt Springs, 
hall' a dozen miles away, is the Hollins College for 
Girls, one of the best known and most fashionable 
finishing schools in the South. From the day when the 
Roanoke youngster first scrawls on his slate the 
straggling letters of the alphabet until, in cap and gown. 
he receives his beribboned diploma and his university 
degree at a famous institution of learning, he need 
never go beyond the limits of the region of which 
Roanoke is the center. I doubt, indeed, if there is any 
place in the United Stales where a boy or girl can obtain 
so thorough an education at such small cost and amid 
such inspiring traditions as in Southwestern Virginia. 

From the southern confines of the city the densely 
forested n!o|>c> of Mill Mountain rise abruptly a 






T li I. II i: C K X I X (, /.I A I) id A* \m.ltik 





thousand feel into the air. A few years ago a little 
group of public-spirited citizens buill an inclined rail- 
way np Hie >ide of (he mountain, so thai now yon can 
reach the top in precisely the same fashion in which 
visitors to Switzerland ascend the Rigi or the Matter- 
horn. A I the summit there is a sort of a Swiss ( 'ha I can. 
where they serve chicken dinners, with an extraordina- 
rily beautiful view thrown in. Spread at one's feet lies 
Roanoke, nestling in the encircling arm of the river, its 
light-colored buildings and broad, well-paved thorough- 
fares making it look for all I he world like one of those 
plaster of paris models which yon see in museums. At 
night a powerful searchlight plays incessantly on the 
city from the mountain-top, and under its magic ray 
the busy, bustling town suddenly changes to a fairy 
city of ivory and alabaster. In the daytime, however, 
the urban skyline is broken in a hundred places by the 
monster factories, railway shops, structural iron works, 
and other manufacturing plants which have combined 
to make it one of the industrial centers of the South. 
Progressive citizens have harnessed the abundant water 
power of the Appalachian ranges, and it is now being 
distributed to the street railways and industries of the 
cities and towns, and also to suburban sections, thus 
relieving the housekeepers of all the adjacent country 
of much manual labor, besides in a huge degree elimi- 
nating the smoke nuisance. In the distance long trails 
of smoke, smeared against the sky, indicate tin- routes 








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T II E B EC K N I N G L . 1 A 7 1) 

of the steel highways which link Roanoke with the coal 
fields and with tidewater, with Richmond, Washington, 
Norfolk, Memphis, Charleston, Columbus, and Cin- 
cinnati. On one side of the gem-like valley, in which 
lie city lies, the storied Bine Ridge range sweeps up to 
meet the clouds; on the other side the green-and- 
purple bulk of the Alleghanies loom like a mighty wall, 
while far to the northward rise the twin Peaks of ( M ter, 
pale violet against the sky. 

Although Roanoke is, as I have tried to show yon, 
an exceptionally attractive, and prosperous, and pro- 
gressive city, its industrial importance is not so much 
due to its amazing growth as to the fact that it is the 
entrepot to an enormously rich and fertile hinterland. 
That is the most important factor in the making of a 
city; that it should have at its hack a thickly-settled 
hinterland with a prosperous population. If you will 
get out the family atlas and turn to the map of Vir- 
ginia you can see for yourself that Roanoke is pe- 
culiarly fortunate in this respect. Xot only is it the 
portal to the ureal Valley of Virginia, three hundred 
miles long and as large as the State of Massachusetts. 
hut it is the natural center for that great rich region 
where the states of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, 
Tennessee, and North Carolina come together. Two 
railway systems, with their numerous ramifications, 
bring within its commercial sphere of influence the great 
coal-mining country of which Minefield is the center. 




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T II E B K (' K () N I X G L A N I) 



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the famous apple-growing bell of Southwestern Vir- 
ginia, with ils ten thousand square miles of orchards, 
and the celebrated "blue grass" belt, which is a con- 
tinuation of those rich grazing lands which have made 
the horseflesh of Kentucky famous. 

Have you ever, by any chance, visited this blue 
grass region? No? 1 1 is. I give you my word, the 
most wonderful grazing land in this or any other 
country. 'Flic grass, which, by the way. is not blue at 
all. but a peculiarly vivid green (the man who named it 
must have been color blind, poor fellow), attains its 
best development upon clay soils overlying limestone, 
growing to perfection in that zone which extends from 
Western Virginia into Kentucky and Tennessee. Blue 
grass, though furnishing hay of excellent quality, does 
not yield a large quantity and on this account its chief 
value is for pasturage. For this purpose it is un- 
surpassed. It spreads with amazing rapidity, forming 
a firm, dense sod which is not appreciably injured by I he 
trampling of stock. Three years are required, so I was 
told, to make a good, firm sod, after which it requires 
practically no at tent ion. In Wythe. Pulaski, and Taze- 
well counties I was shown pasture after pasture more 
than half a century old and in as good condition 
as ever. I met one aged gentleman-farmer who told 
me that his four thousand acres of blue grass pasture 
had not known a plowshare in sixty years. lie lived 
in a big, old-fashioned homestead on a hill overlooking; 





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THE liECKOXIXd LAXD 



all his vast estate. A friend called my attention to the 
fact that two parallel grooves were worn almost through 
the planking of the piazza. 

"Do you see those marks?" asked he. 

"Yes," answered I. "What about them?" 

"They are characteristic of this region," said he. 
"They have been made by the old gentleman's rocker. 
For sixty years he has had nothing to do but sit in his 
rocking chair upon this piazza and watch the grass 
grow and the stock fatten and the money come rolling 
in. And all over this section you will find men who 
have become rich in precisely the same fashion." 

Think of having a farm which requires neither 
harrowing, nor plowing, nor seeding, nor fertilizing, 
and to which neither frost nor rain can do serious harm. 
A farm like that is better than owning Standard Oil 
stock or receiving an annuity. One of these rocking- 
chair farmers told me that he could raise a steer to 
every acre ami that the steers netted him about ninety 
dollars a head. I have had occasion to see a good deal 
of farming lands in many countries — in Rhodesia, for 
example, and in Morocco, and British Columbia, and 
Northern Mexico, and the Imperial Valley of Cali- 
fornia — and I rather think that, were 1 a man with 
moderate means and some knowledge of stock-raising, 
and didn't wish to work too hard for a living, I should 
go down into Southwestern Virginia and purchase a 
few hundred acres of land in (he blue grass section. 






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T II K B E C KO X I N G L A N I) 25 

Improved farms arc, of course, expensive, just as any 
dividend-paying stock is expensive, bringing all the 
way from $150 to $300 an acre, but uncleared land. 
which has precisely the same soil as the richest blue 
grass pastures, can be had al quite nominal figures. 
Such land, if cleared and seeded to blue grass, would, 
in three or four years' time, permil the owner to become 
a real armchair agriculturist. These Virginian farm- 
ers live quite a different life from their fellows of the 
North, remember, for they nearly all have telephones 
in their houses, ami player-pianos, and phonographs, 
and when business or pleasure calls I hem to town they 
crank up the family automobile. But where they have 
the greatest advantage of the Northern farmer is (hat 
they escape those long, cold, deadly dull, six-inches-of- 
ice-and-six-feet-of-snow Northern winters. 

Doubtless it was because my imagination had been 
captured by the glowing tales of amazing crops and 
still more amazing profits told me by the red apple 
boosters of Oregon, but. until 1 visited the Roanoke 
country. I had never thought of Virginia as an apple- 
producing state. As a matter of fact, however, it has 
more apple trees in bearing than Oregon, Washington, 
and California combined. Although persistent and ex- 
tensive advertising which, by the way. is the thing \ "ir- 
ginia most needs- has educated the public to associate 

g I apples with the Hood River country of ( )regon just 

as they associate good champagne with Rheims, the 

























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T II E B E C K N I N G L A N D 

Hood River Valley has attained a fame wholly dis- 
proportionate to its size, for it is not much of a valley, 
as valleys go in Virginia, being but twenty-five miles 
long and three wide. The Shenandoah Valley, which 
is the apple-producing section of Virginia, is, on the 
contrary, twenty-five miles wide and three hundred 
miles long, with a soil almost identical with that of 
Oregon hut having a somewhat milder climate. Sta- 
tistics don't mean very much to me, and I don't be- 
lieve they do to the average reader either, but a busi- 
ness man living in the fruit section assured me that a 
quarter of a million barrels of apples had been shipped 
out of that district last year, and, as he seemed to lay 
such particular emphasis on the fact, I am repeating 
I he information for what it is worth. 

Throughout my visit in Southwestern Virginia I 
was struck by the extraordinary number of farmers 
who were racing about the country in big, expensive- 
looking automobiles, but it was not until I went into 
the apple-growing section that I discovered how they 
were able to afford them. For example, I was shown 
one orchard, in the Hack Creek country near Roanoke, 
consisting of eight hundred trees, the owner of which 
had sold his crop for $15,000 cash, the purchaser to do 
the work of picking. Another man, who had only four 
acres of trees high on a mountainside, sold his last 
season's crop for $ L 2, .)()() and he didn't have to do the 
picking either. Still another orchard was pointed out 




I 






"The Natural Bridge is, as its name implies, a titanic limestone arch, 215 feet high, 100 feet wide, and 90 feel 
in span, thus providing a natural passageway over the tumultuous waters of Cedar Creek. Perhaps 
it will give a more graphic conception of its immensity if I add that were the Statue of Liberty in New 
York harbor to be placed under it, pedestal and all, there would still be threescore feet to spare." 




**-■; 



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T II E B E C K N I N G L A N D 29 

to me, a place of one hundred acres, which last year 
netted its owner $35,000. No wonder the apple- 
growers of Virginia ride ahoul in automobiles. The 
surprising thing is thai (hey don'1 own yachts. 

Many of the most profitable orchards are high up 
on the mountainsides, in a country which a Northern 
farmer wouldn't consider a good pasture for goats. 
The object in this is, of course, to avoid the frost, an 
orchard on a hillside frequently being passed over by 
the spring frost while one in the valley below sutlers 
severely. On the higher slopes, moreover, the soil is 
always moist and cool and the fruit grown there seems 
to attain greater perfection. There are so many things 
which affect the price of orchard properties that there 
seems nothing to be gained by attempting to give any 
idea of the cost of apple lands, further than to remark 
that uncleared land, highly adapted for orchard pur- 
poses and accessible to the railway, max - be had for 
ten dollars an acre upward, depending, of course, upon 
its location and the development of the adjoining 
region. Everything considered, however, it seems to 
me thai apple-growing in Virginia has orange-growing 
in Florida or California beaten to a frazzle, for the 
owner of an apple orchard does not have to lie awake 
nights fearing that his prospects will be wiped out by 
frost before morning. 

I wonder how long it will be before motorists will 
appreciate what they are missing, both scenically and 




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30 



THE B EC K N I N G L A N 1) 



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historically, by not turning the hoods of their cars 
Virginiawards, for the most remote counties of the 
Slate are fast being covered with a network of motor 
highways which rival the famous routes nationales of 
France. Beside Virginia the states to the westward are 
merest parvenus. Its hills are dotted with the home- 
steads of families whose names are familiar to every 
schoolboy. These mountains have looked down on 
Sir Walter Raleigh and his swaggering cavaliers; on 
Captain John Smith, his face stern and grim under his 
steel cap; on George Washington, who. within the 
borders of Virginia, fought in turn the Indians, and I he 
French, and the British; on Jefferson, the statesman, 
and on Patrick Henry, the orator; on Daniel Boone and 
Davy Crockett, those advance-guards of civilization, 
who blazed through this very region the historic road 
to the West known as the Cumberland Trail; these 
fertile valleys once resounded to the clatter of Sheri- 
dan's hard-riding troopers, to I he crackle of Stone- 
wall Jackson's musketry, and to the tramp-tramp- 
tramp of the legions of Grant and I^ee. 

Because, for some unexplainahle reason, they have 
never been properly advertised, most people are wholly 
unaware that within a short morning's run of Roanoke 
by motor car are two of the world's wonders: the 
Natural Bridge of Virginia and the Caverns of Luray. 
In the days of our grandfathers the Natural Bridge of 
\ irginia and the Mamniolh Cave of Kentucky were as 



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THE BECKONING LAND 31 

much a pari of the itinerary of every traveled Ameri- 
can as the Grand Canon and the Yosemite are to-day, 
but " autres jours, (nitres moeurs" as the French say. 
The Natural Bridge is, as its name implies a titanic 
limestone arch, 215 feel high, 100 feet wide, and !)<) feet 
in span, thus providing a natural passageway over 
the tumultuous waters of Cedar Creek. Perhaps it 
will give a more graphic conception of its immensity 
if I add that were the Statue of Liberty in New York 
harbor to be placed under it. pedestal and all. there 
would still be threescore feet to spare. 

Some years ago, when 1 was living in Brussels, I 
made an excursion into the Belgian Ardennes for the 
purpose of visiting the celebrated Grottoes of Ilaan. 
They are marvelously beautiful, are these stalactite 
caves of Southern Belgium, and when I had com- 
pleted the four-hours' tour of them I was very en- 
thusiastic. 

"Yes, they are very interesting." observed a Ger- 
man scientist who was in the party, "but 1 cannot 
understand you, an American, being so loud in your 
praise of them when you have in your own country a 
cave which is far more wonderful and beautiful." 

"You mean the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, I 
suppose?" asked I. 

"Not at all," answered he. "That is very large 
and very wonderful, of course, but in the beauty and 
color of its formations it should not be spoken of in 






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32 



T II E B E (' K X I X G L A X D 



the same breath with the Virginian Caverns of Luray." 

"I'm ashamed to admit that I've never heard of 
them," said I. 

"That's the way with yon Americans," said he, 
''always packing up and coming over to Europe to see 
the wonders of nature when you have tilings far more 
remarkable at home." 

Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose red-covered guide 
hooks every traveling American clings as tenaciously 
as to his letter of credit, says that these caverns are 
" more completely and profusely decorated with stalae- 
titic and slalagmitic ornamentation than any other in 
the world, surpassing even the celebrated Adelsberg 
Cave in this respect." Imagine, if you can. a hun- 
dred acres of subterranean halls, and chambers, and 
corridors, and passageways, and galleries, many of 
them with running streams or crystal pools, and all of 
them walled, and roofed, and draped with stalactite 
in the most grotesque and fanciful forms and in every 
gradation of color, and as beautiful as the fairy palace 
of one's childhood dreams — such are the Caverns of 
Luray. I, who have seen the wonders of five con- 
tinents, assure you that it is worth the visiting. 

( )f all the things that I saw in Virginia, however, the 
one that will remain longest in my memory was a 
colonial house, an old. old house with rambling negro 
quarters stretching out behind. In front a lawn, 
smooth as a Brussels carpet and shaded by many 











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T II E B E C K n N I N G I A N I> 



33 



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ancient oaks and elms, sweeps down to a singing brook. 
To reach the house you cross the brook by a little 
bridge, and swing back a creaking gate in an old- 
fashioned picket fence, and pass up a rambling, grass- 
grown pathway to the hospitable piazza, with honey- 
suckle clambering over its white columns. It is the 
sort of place which you read about in novels but which 
you never expect to find. Beside the piazza stands a 
venerable giant of an elm with a seat of boards built 
round its base. It was on that seat that Thomas Dunn 
English composed what is said to be the most popular 
song ever written. You may have heard it. It runs 
something like this: 




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"Oh, don't you remember sweet Alice, Hen Bolt, 
Sweet Aliee with hair so brown? 
She wept with delight when you gave tier a smile 
And trembled with fear at your frown." 

and the concluding verses: 

"Do you mind the cabin of logs, Ben Bolt, 
At the edge of the pathless wood. 
And the button-ball tree with its motley limbs 
Which nigh by the doorstep stood? 

"The cabin has gone to ruin. Ben Bolt, 
The tree you would seek in vain. 
And where once the lords of the forest waved 
Grows grass and golden grain." 



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those lines were written nearly three- 



quarters of a century ago their author was more pro- 



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34 



T II E B E C K N I N G L A N D 



phetic than he knew. Not alone the countryside of the 
song, but all this portion of Virginia has changed from 
the old to the new. Even one who sees it only from a 
car-window can hardly fail to be impressed by its air 
of prosperity and progress. Substantial farm houses 
look down upon well-kept farms with neat stables and 
whitewashed fences; sleek cattle stand knee-deep in 
grassy meadows; trim schoolhouses peep out from amid 
the trees at almost every turning; in the spring the 
mountain slopes are white with blossoming orchards; 
the station platforms are piled high with the products 
of farm and factory; the whole land seems a-hum with 
energy and industry. The old, indolent, conservative, 
unprogressive spirit of which the novelists have written 
so much is as dead as the spirit of secession, and in its 
place has come the spirit of progress, of up-and-doing. 
Roanoke, remember, is newer than most western cities 
and hence is unhampered by custom or tradition. As 
a result, the region of which it is the center is, to all 
intents and purposes, a bit of the hustling. bustling- 
West set down in a greener, fairer land. And it is 
calling to those who would make their homes and their 
fortunes under sunny skies. Can't you hear the mur- 
mur of its rivers, and the rustle of its forests, and the 
whisper of the wind amid its grain? They beckon and 
call to you, my friend, to you. That is why I call it 
"The Beckoning Land." 



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014 415 225 S 







UBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 415 225 6 



Hollinger Corp. 



